The book

In 1925, an American artist and teacher named Florence Scovel Shinn published a small book called The Game of Life and How to Play It.

It was a hundred pages long. It was written in the language of her time and based on her Christian faith.

It described a set of principles about how the mind creates the conditions of a person's life, and it has been loved by readers for a hundred years since.

I read it. I adored it.

I also noticed that every business owner I know would put it down in the first chapter.

The teaching was solid. The language was not going to survive contact with a modern, sceptical, busy reader who had not signed up for Christian spiritual guidance.

One day, a thought arrived. It was fully formed, and it would not leave.

Adapt the book.

So I did.

The Game of Business and How to Play It publishes today.
In Kindle, paperback and hardback

Florence's book, rebuilt for 2026.

Ten laws, ten chapters, and the stories of business owners who learned them the expensive way.

The laws cover the things nobody puts on the org chart. The negative picture you keep rehearsing. The words you say about your business when nobody is listening. The problem you have gripped for months. The work that is yours alone and that you have never gone looking for.

If your business is fine and something still feels off, that is what the ten laws address.

The structure is hers. The ten chapters and the order of them are hers. The underlying principles are hers and have been taught, in one form or another, by many spiritual leaders for thousands of years.

Florence did not invent them. But she articulated them in a way that worked for the world of 1925, and she did an incredible job.

Every example in my version is a contemporary business story rather than one of Florence's original anecdotes. The religious framing has been replaced with universal language.

There are new sections, drawn from my experience as a founder and from patterns I have seen in the businesses of others.

And wherever a principle sounds half mystical, I stop and explain the mechanism behind it. Those sections are for the reader who would otherwise close the book at that sentence.

If that is you, welcome.

No belief required. These are ideas you can test on your own week.

Two writers, a hundred years apart, working on the same material.

Florence Scovel Shinn is underneath all of it. She gets the credit, and she gets the credit of every reader who finds these principles useful because she put them on paper a century before I did.

The book is hers as much as mine. I am grateful to her for the work, and I have tried to take it forward in a way she would have wanted.

The teaching is older than both of us. In reading it, you keep it alive.

The Game of Business and How to Play It
Publishes today: Kindle, paperback and hardback

Let's play.